In its admitted zeal to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood, the state of Texas is making it perfectly, chillingly clear that it is willing to wreak havoc with the lives and health of low-income Texas women to achieve that goal. On Monday, it fired its latest salvo, securing a stay of an order, granted earlier that day, that would have allowed the organization to temporarily provide family planning services to tens of thousands of Texas women.

Planned Parenthood serves almost 50 percent of the 130,000 or so low-income women served by the Medicaid Women's Health Program in Texas. The state enforced new rules this year that would exclude funding to Planned Parenthood clinics because the organization provides abortions as well as basic women's health services.

But Planned Parenthood uses no federal or state funds to provide abortions, because federal law prohibits it. Its abortion services are equipped, staffed and housed in separate facilities, and amount to only 3 percent of its services. The other 97 percent provide family planning, screening and other health services. None of the 49 clinics that will be removed from the program provides abortions.

Last month, nine Planned Parenthood groups sued the state, arguing that the newly enforced rule was a violation of their constitutional rights, prompting state officials to promise that if the courts sided with the plaintiffs, they would simply end the program.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel temporarily blocked the state's ban, acknowledging the groups' right to pursue their case. He was "particularly influenced," he wrote, "by the potential for immediate loss of access to necessary medical services by several thousand Texas women." Within hours, the state appealed, and a federal court judge stayed that order. On Tuesday, state health officials began excluding Planned Parenthood clinics from the program.

The federal funding that paid 90 percent of the $40 million cost of the program is gradually being withdrawn because the new Texas ruling violates federal law. Ironically, this program was created in part "to reduce expenditures for Medicaid-paid births by increasing access to family planning services." In 2009, Medicaid covered approximately 56 percent of all births in Texas.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has said the state will step in to fully fund the program, but offered no specifics. We have to agree with Judge Yeakel, who wrote that the current Texas record "gives the court no comfort that funds are or will be available" when federal funds are phased out.

The end result is that for now, ideology is trumping the Constitution. Planned Parenthood clinics that by law have no connection with providing abortion cannot give essential preventive health care and family planning services to poor women in Texas. Unintended pregnancies and abortion rates will rise, families will suffer and taxpayers will also be paying a heavy price. We will all be the losers if the state prevails.